A microfiche appendix is included in this application.
This invention relates, generally, to a method for controlling a network element and, more particularly, to a method for remotely controlling the network by communications through the network.
Network management systems in which network elements, or management agents, are remotely controlled from a remote, management work station by means of communications between the management work station and the managed network elements sent through the network are known. Such known network management systems employ a special communication protocol for communications between the remote work station running a management program and an element management server that contains a management information base that defines the interface between the work station and the network elements.
Known systems such as (Hewlett Packard HP-OV NNM or DM, Sun Microsystems Solstice) present an interface where the client application must poll the network element when status is needed. In these systems, the polling may not be coordinated and is replicated for each client, if each client is interested in the same attributes. Also, each of the clients receive the full results for each polling cycle (even if there was no change from the last cycle), increasing the bandwidth used to communicate between the client application and the network element, as well as creating additional processing overhead due to the replicated polling at the network element.
A method is provided for controlling a network element from a remote work station connectable to the network. The method provides for registering the network element for attributes to be tracked, and polling for attributes associated with the network element only if the client requests the monitoring of the network element. Changes in attributes are reported when the client requests notification of changes in attributes. For attributes polled for a plurality of clients, changes in the attributes to one of the plurality of clients requesting notification of changes in the attributes are reported.
The method further provides for polling once for a plurality of clients that registers for the same attributes and reporting asynchronously changes in the attributes to a plurality of clients.
Another aspect of the invention provides for running an object oriented program at the remote work station to control an object associated with the controllable network element, translating interface operations generated by the work station during the running of the object oriented program to corresponding translated interface operations in an object oriented language associated with the object being controlled, and connecting the corresponding translated interface operations through the network to an object server to control the object associated with the network element in accordance with the translated interface operations.
These and other features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent from the following detailed description, the accompanying drawings and the appended claims.